The Hour Before Dark (23 page)

“You told me earlier—”

“Yes. I felt something here. Like a gravitational pull. Not just all who had died here. Every place on earth has had death and violence and bones buried. But when the spirits linger, it’s because they’re trapped. Most are not trapped. Here, something is trapped and is waiting. Not here, not on this boulder. But somewhere here.”

Harry switched the tape recorder off.

“We went all over the island that night. It seemed like a colossal waste of time, Nemo. Til we got to your place.” He switched on the machine again, fast forwarded, listened for a word or two, then fast forwarded the tape some more. Then: “Here.”

“Here?”

“It’s strong here,” she said.

A cut in the tape, and then a strange sound like a strong wind.

“I edited the tape. Badly,” Harry told me.

Then, “Here. Right here,” the woman said. She whispered, “I can feel it. It wants to come into me. I’m inviting it, but it doesn’t want to. Shhh... It’s all right. It’s all right. No, no.”

“What’s happening?” Harry asked on the tape.

A silence.

Then a different woman’s voice. “OPEN THE DOOR! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT! PLEASE! GOD HELP ME! I WANT TO LEAVE! I WANT TO GET OUT!’’

4

Then nothing.

Harry stopped the tape.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” Harry nodded. “I dropped the tape recorder after that. She grabbed me, and her eyes went white, rolling up into her head. I practically had to throw her down. Ever see documentary footage of voodoo ceremonies? It was like that. It was like something had taken her over. When it was through, she was exhausted. She slept for two days. After that, she refused to come back. Hell, she refused to talk to me again. She left the island a few weeks later and wouldn’t take my calls. Her husband told me that if I bothered them again, he’d call the cops. I had been calling a lot. I wanted to know what had gone on. And then I got a letter from her. No return address. All she wrote to me was: Don’t ever go in that place again. Something terrible happened there. Some ritual. Some awful, powerful ritual And that was it.”

“It was at Hawthorn,” I said.

“We were outside the smokehouse,” Harry said.

5

“Why the smokehouse?” I asked. Rephrased it: “Why did you take her to the smokehouse?”

Harry shrugged. “Someone died there, maybe. Maybe a hundred years ago. Or who knows. She didn’t exactly stick around and tell me. I mean, if you buy this. Do you buy it?”

“Not really. It’s ... fucked up. But... it was because of the Brain Fart,” I said, nearly impulsively.

He wagged a finger at me. “Don’t make me go there.”

6

But it was too late: The moving image of the past had already begun showing in my brain. Me and Brooke and Bruno, sitting on the big plush blue sofa in the living room, after we had our Brain Fart.

Harry Withers, all of nine years old, sitting beside me with a big gold watch and a chain—his father would’ve killed him if he had known Harry had taken it. Waving it back and forth, saying, “Look at the watch, how shiny it is.” He had learned it on TV and in some books, when he saw some hypnotist put an entire studio audience to sleep. Harry had always been up for hypnotisms, séances with an old ratty Ouija board he had (which he called a Weejun board, not understanding the difference between Ouija and Bass Weejun shoes). None of us was up for being hypnotized, but eventually we did fell asleep—out of exhaustion and boredom.

7

“It was the Brain Fart. We had it, and it was at the smokehouse, and you tried to hypnotize us back then,” I said, vaguely wishing for some of Harry’s Scotch to help dull my senses a bit.

“What’s that smokehouse mean to you?”

“It’s an old smokehouse.”

“Tell me about it. Its history.”

“Well, far as I know, the current one was built sometime around 1850. I’m not up on its history. They used to smoke meat out there.”

“What else?”

“It hasn’t been used since maybe. I don’t know. My grandfather never used it. It’s just been sitting.”

“Funny. It’s been my experience that somehow everything is used for something. Even if it’s not apparent at first.”

“Profound,” I said.

“It’s true. At least, I’ve found it to be true.”

“I never knew about it if it were ever used when I lived here. Dad might’ve stored stuff there. At one time. But he usually used the cabin for his tools.”

“That’s not true,” Harry said. “You told me yourself when we were kids. You called it ‘the place of punishment.’"

“Oh. Yeah. It was. That’s what we called it. Before I was nine or ten, that’s where Dad would haul me or Brooke off to spank us.”

“Just spank?”

“Well, with a belt a couple of times. Nothing too horrible. It stopped at a certain point.” I remembered more: “And my grandfather used to take him out there, too, when he was a kid. And my uncle. There was a post in the middle of the floor—well, in the dirt. Dad put the wood-slats of the floor down long after that. There was a post and Grandpa would tie one or more sons to it. Dad said it was stuff that people get arrested for now, but in his childhood, that’s how it was. Whippings. Birchings. I asked him why he didn’t tell anybody, and he said back then, there were about 100 people on the island, and most of them just looked the other way. Most of them thought whipping protected boys from growing up bad. Dad had horrible stories about it. My grandfather seemed really sweet, but my dad said he sometimes got whipped so hard that his back stuck to the sheets at night because of the blood. He hated that old man. He was practically happy when he died so that Dad could take care of Granny.” I paused a moment. “Harry, there’s no ghost. Unless it’s my great-grandma.”

“Forget the word ‘ghost,’" Harry said. “It’s a phenomenon. Belief in the afterlife doesn’t need to come into this. A phenomenon. That’s all it is. Right now. In the meantime, I want you to ask Brooke if she experienced anything there.”

“Brooke?”

“Sure,” he said. “She was in the smokehouse for a couple of hours.”

“So were cops.”

“But the cops didn’t experience any phenomena. You did. Brooke might’ve,” he said.

Grabbing my cup of hot tea from his newspaper-stacked coffee table, I asked, “Do you believe in ghosts, Harry?”

He smiled. “You and me were altar boys, Nemo. I believe that a man’s body and blood can come from wine and a wafer. I believe that a woman who is a virgin can give birth. I believe that God decided to come to the world in human form a couple thousand years ago. Do I really believe in all that? Yes and no. Part of me wants it to be true. Part of me thinks it’s a way of re-imagining existence, and our relationship with whatever created the world. Maybe virginity means purity. Maybe wine and water mean acceptance of a transcendent idea—that water can be wine. Maybe there was this guy who aligned himself so well with the truth of all existence that it was as if he were the son of God. But you know what? I don’t know. It might literally be water into wine, and a man who was God. I want to know, but I don’t. I’m not smart enough.” He leaned back in his leather chair and swiveled it around. He pointed to the tape machine. “If people die and remain where they died, that seems a bit easier to swallow, doesn’t it? Not that I do. I mean, ghosts? Not really. I’ve experienced this twice now. With you. With Mary Manley. If it had only happened once, I could forget about it. But twice?”

“Well, it’s weird. I’ll give you that.” Then I let out a kind of hyena laugh of relief.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“You used to hold séances.”

“Oh, please. It was just a Ouija board.”

“You do believe in ghosts, don’t you?” I asked.

Harry didn’t answer immediately.

Then he told me the story about seeing something once, when he was twelve years old. “One time, I was sleeping over at your place. And I sat in the love seat. You sat in some kind of spindly chair. We were up late. Everyone had gone to bed. And I brought my father’s pocket watch out.”

“And you tried to put me under,” I said. “Like you tried to do with all three of us before. Only you didn’t.”

“I did put you under,” he said.

8

“You were surprisingly easy. It was as if you’d been hypnotized before. I just never told you about it. I was... well, I was too scared. At first, I did stuff I’d read in this book on hypnosis. I put some ammonia from the kitchen under your nose. You inhaled it as if it were nothing. Then I pinched your arm so hard it left a red mark. Not a squeak out of you. Then I had you say something silly, something humiliating to a twelve- year-old. I’m not sure what it was, but I can guarantee it made me laugh. And then, when I asked you to recite a nursery rhyme, you began this long one. This one with fruit in it and bells.”

“Oranges and lemons,” I said. “Christ”

“Whatever it was, it gave me chills the way you said it. You said it like it was a ritual. I even thought you might’ve been doing it on purpose and perhaps weren’t hypnotized at all. But at the end of it, you said something to me that I will never forget, Nemo. Your eyes popped open, suddenly— quickly enough that I nearly jumped out of my skin—and you said, ‘Your father’s dying. He’ll be dead soon enough.’ I stared at you for ten minutes after that before I brought you out of it. I made sure you wouldn’t remember even being hypnotized. But it scared me, what you said. And the thing is, we didn’t know my father was already dying. He was. You had told me something in that trance that was absolutely true. So I did it again.”

“Again?”

“Hypnotized you,” he said. “A few months later, I had to see if you really had said that. If you could tell me things.”

“I would’ve known if you’d hypnotized me.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I did it a couple times. You didn’t know. I had a control phrase. If you heard it, you’d go under. You were extremely suggestible. Nemo. It was as if you’d been hypnotized by someone for years.”

“That’s an awful thing you did,” I said. “You really did it?”

“Sure. It was awful. It was like some kind of big secret I had. But I couldn’t help myself. Not after you’d told me about my father’s upcoming death. And you told me other things. I didn’t want to find out much. I’d just ask you about things I wanted to know about. You knew things that a boy your age could not possibly have known. You had this wealth of knowledge. I could ask you nearly anything....”

“What are you getting at?”

“I asked you something, when we were eighteen, hanging out by the Triumph Theater, smoking."

"What?”

“I asked you if your mother was ever going to come back. And you know what you said? Under? You said that she had never left. You started wailing. It sounded like you were a two-year-old. I couldn’t bring you out of it. Nemo, you don’t have any memory of it, do you?”

I shook my head. “Jesus, Harry. Christ. You did that to me?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But when you told me about my father... and it turned out to be true... I just couldn’t... I couldn’t stop. You knew things Nemo—only it wasn’t like it was you. How could you know the things I asked about?"

"You didn’t tape record any of that, did you?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I wish I had. And don’t look like that—I didn’t do it all the time. Only a few times. But it scared me each time. I just wanted to figure you out.”

“Figure me out? Why?”

He took a deep breath, “There was always something wrong with you. No—:not just with you. Something at your house. It was like something I couldn’t figure out. Like there was a cloud there. Or some unspoken thing. And I guess maybe I wanted to find out more. Maybe it was the reporter in me. That sounds goofy, but you were writing your stories back then, so that was no goofier than me wanting to investigate things. I found ... everything about you and your family fascinating. But I wanted to figure out what it was that kept me—I don’t know—confused, about you.”

I stared at him long and hard, thoughts spinning around in my head as if I was equally confused by Harry Withers. “Okay, how’d you do it? What was the control phrase?”

“If I say it, you might go under again.”

I laughed. “After all these years?”

“Would you consider going under again?”

I didn’t know what to say. But I was curious and annoyed at the same time. I had so many chunks of my childhood that felt as if they’d been removed without my knowing, like a perverse Operation.

I was determined to prove him wrong. “All right. Let’s do it. See if you can put me under.”

Then he said something to me, but I couldn’t remember what it was ten seconds later, and the next thing I knew, I blinked.

9

He no longer sat behind his desk.

Instead, he stood over me.

“Nothing,” he said. “I thought I put you under, and maybe I did for a minute. But nothing.”

“Nothing on tape?”

He glanced at the digital recorder in his hand. He had begun sweating, but I didn’t feel particularly warm in the room. “Nothing. You said nothing. You just seemed asleep."

"Well, so much for that,” I said, somewhat pleased that I wasn’t just some guinea pig waiting to be exploited.

He walked back behind his desk, glancing around his bookshelf, touching the spines of various volumes. “It’s here somewhere. Oh, here,” he said, drawing a tall, slim paperback from the shelf. He turned and held it out to me. “Take it.”

I went over to his desk and took the book from him.
Talking to the Lost
by Mary Manley. I looked at him, shaking my head. “Harry...”

“She’s not like other kooks who do this. Just skim it a little, when you get the chance,” he said. “There’s a section about childhood rituals you might want to look at.”

10

Even on the way out the door, he began ranting about mysteries and ghosts and strange, weird, wacko things. But everything in my being fought the idea of a ghost or any supernatural phenomena at all. It was all make believe. It’s like the Dark Game, I told myself.
It’s like pretending so hard that it seems real. But that’s all it is. Maybe it’s the stress. Maybe the psychic’s moment outside the smokehouse was like the Oracles at Delphi—there’s some kind of underground gasses released at the spot, and it causes some sort of seizure.